Creative Ikea

Is is really bad when you starting getting creative decorating ideas based on Ikea furniture?

Is it a sign that you've done one too many visits to that great warehouse under the sun?

I think perhaps I should keep a secret my designer Ikea. Perhaps they might be interested?

A Foot Long

 
How long as it been? Not long but she's as pretty as ever and now is starting to roll over. She has the whole world ahead of her (what a cliche) and I'll be here watching.

New Addtion to the family

Here's a video of our new daughter getting ready to come home from the hospital.

Train Topology Anyone?

I have been playing with my sons Geotrax system of late. When he wants to play trains it means he sits on the bed and daddy puts the trains together so that he can break them apart.

So naturally, being the nurd that I am, was wondering if there was a mathematical way to determine the number of layouts that used every piece of a given set of pieces. I have recently managed to create a layout that uses every piece:


The question is. How many are there like this? Also, how do you determine what their basic topological properties are such as how the points relate to each other and what the symmetric must look like.

Any ideas?

There's no Honour in Killing

Ok, so there's plenty of news and blogs about the aborent practise in some places of honour killings yet most of them just repeat the same ideas, that it is incredible such things still go on and they should be stopped.

These are easy things to say and certainly put you on the right side of things but has anyone stopped to consider how something like this would play out in western society?

Picture this, teenage daughter comes home later than her curfew. Parents are upset as they expected more from her. They tell her that their family has a reputation has a good upstanding family and her actions would lead people in the community to think otherwise. They were sorry but she would have to be killed.

Can you put yourself in that position? Of course we find it difficult to image our parents ever saying something like that in the first place and if they did then we just wouldn't take them seriously.

But what if they were serious and more than that everyone we might speak to about it would take their side and agree with the sentance? What if even people in authority like the police whilst not condoning our theoritical parents actions they would not intervene.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a society were there is no recourse, there is no second opinion. I would imagine that you might resist and try to fight it and if you were strong willed then you might find a way out. But if you weren't then you might feel like there was no way out, that perhaps rather than be killed the only option is to kill yourself.

I have read recently that some females who have been given an honour sentence feel this way, it's almost like having suicidal thoughts yet they are no fault of your own.

How does one change society? Society has such a huge momentum behind it and exists in the behaviour of millions of people? If for generations these things have been accepted in a particular society then how is any member of that society able to break out from these rules? It seems impossible doesn't it? How am I any more able to change for instance the western social view on public nudity?

Yet perhaps the difference might be that we are taught to question the things told to us, to work things out for ourselves rather than taking at face value that which someone else tells us. This works for us but it doesn't help those who are dying for someones concept of honour.